Luke bet his mum Jay £10 he could read and review all the books in the Independent's list of 50 books for Y7 kids by Christmas. This is the blog of his progress

Tuesday, 29 March 2011

Emil and the Detectives

Hello. Luke here. This is my first review out of the 50. I thought I would start with a positive review so I chose this book and I have to say that this book is great.

When I started I have to say I had my doubts but they were soon gone as I was sucked into the world of Emil. Emil is set in Germany and it is about when a man with a bowler hat steals Emil's £7. He then goes on to retrieve his money from the thief with the help of most of the boys in the city. It was fast paced, interesting and went straight to the action. On my scale of 1 to 100 this book claims a well earned 70.

Jay Writes - Emil and the Detectives is by Erich Kastner. Luke read this edition. There's a sequel called Emil and the Three Twins. We'd like to point out that this Emil is a totally different one to the hero of Astrid Lindgren's series, also rather confusingly called Emil and the Clever Pig/Sneaky Rat/Great Escape. Luke liked Mr Kastner's Emil much better.

A really intriguing list! And I'm embarrassed to say that I haven't even heard of some of these titles, and I haven't read Emil and the Detectives either.

So get off this blog, I hear you cry...but I do own quite a few of these, if you want to borrow, Luke. And I'd really recommend the Annotated Alice by Martin Gardener for item number 1, lots of fascinating footnotes pointing out all the jokes, giving versions of the Jabberwocky in Medieval Latin, and other random stuff. (Really, it is interesting.)